GoKawiilIf you want an app you built to be downloadable from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, it has to pass a slew of criteria, including safety standards.
But a new report on Wednesday alleges that Apple and Google broke their own rules by promoting "nudify" apps that are outlawed in their app store policies.
The Tech Transparency Project, part of a nonprofit tech watchdog, first revealed in January that Apple and Google app stores had over 100 nudify or undressing apps. These are apps with the sole purpose of taking images of people, usually women, and editing them to appear to be that person without clothing, creating what's called nonconsensual intimate imagery. Many of these apps use generative AI to create deepfakes.
Apple removed some of the prohibited apps at the time. But many are still out there, as evidenced in a subsequent investigation.
In April, TTP found that Apple and Google still allowed users to search for a number of troubling keywords, including "nudify," "undress" and "deepnude." After a deep dive on the top 10 apps across both app stores, TTP found that 40% of the apps advertised themselves as able to "render women nude or scantily clad," according to the report.
The new report also found that Google and Apple actually promoted such apps in their stores, increasing their visibility, with Google in particular creating "a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation."
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Apple and Google both have language in their policies that prohibits apps with "overtly sexual or pornographic material" (Apple) and "sexually suggestive poses in which the subject is nude, blurred or minimally clothed" (Google). And they've both enforced these policies in the past -- particularly by going after porn apps.
But Apple and Google make money from app developers by running advertising and taking a part of paid app subscriptions. Analytics firm AppMagic found that these "nudify" apps were downloaded 483 million times and made more than $122 million in lifetime revenue.
"This revenue stream may be why the two companies have been less than vigilant when it comes to nudify apps that violate their policies," TTP writes.
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